Giulio Cesare (review)

• Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

• Glyndebourne, 2005 (filmed August 14 and 17, 2005)

• Opus Arte DVD, 2006

• Conductor: William Christie

• Director: David McVicar

• Set Designer: Robert Jones

• Costume Designer: Brigitte Reiffenstuel

• Lighting Designer: Paule Constable

• Movement Director: Andrew George

• Television Director: Robin Lough

• Television Producer: Ferenc van Damme

• Giulio Cesare: Sarah Connolly

• Sesto: Angelika Kirchschlager

• Cleopatra: Danielle de Niese

• Cornelia: Patricia Bardon

• Achilla: Christopher Maltman

• Tolomeo: Christophe Dumaux

• Nireno: Rachid Ben Abdeslam

• Curio: Alexander Ashworth

The phenomenal ascent in prominence and popularity of Handel's operas must surely rank among the most remarkable developments in the recent history of opera performance. Utterly abandoned even before the composer's death, Handel's operas were first revived in a series of German performances beginning in 1920. In the years to follow, the works were staged with accelerating frequency, and they are today produced regularly in opera houses large and small throughout the world.

Not surprisingly, the meteoric rise of an operatic genre rife with unfamiliar conventions has triggered much debate regarding strategies for musical and dramatic production. For example, the early revivals did away with many of the most characteristic musical elements of opera seria—long ritornellos, da capo arias, high-ranged lead male roles, and so on—in an attempt to make the works more palatable to modern audiences. Such musical alterations were roundly criticized by some scholars—Winton Dean most prominent among them—as constituting a "butchering" of Handel's scores. With the rise of the early music movement, an increased understanding of the performance practices of the high Baroque, the reemergence of countertenors, and the increased availability of critical editions, this controversy seems largely to have been settled: the great majority of productions of Handel operas now attempt to perform them in a manner consistent with what is known of the musical practices of Handel's day.

The controversy currently in full blaze concerns not the music but the staging of the operas. Although some modern productions attempt in one way or another to pay tribute to the eighteenth-century context in which the works were conceived and originally performed, an increasing number eschew any nod to historical "accuracy" in favor of modern, often radical, directorial concepts. Among the best-known video recordings of such productions is Peter Sellars's 1990 Giulio Cesare in Egitto (rereleased on DVD in 2006), in which Caesar is cast not as a Roman dictator but as a modern-day world leader visiting an international hotel in the troubled Middle East.¹ A particularly provocative example is David McVicar's 2000 Monnaie production of Agrippina (revived in 2007 by the English National Opera), in which Nerone snorts cocaine, Poppea and Agrippina get drunk, Poppea twice strips down to sexy lingerie, the characters engage in overt sexual groping, and the supertitle translations repeatedly feature strong expletives.

Although concerns regarding such modernized, "conceptual" productions are of course not unique to Handel's operas (or, indeed, to opera generally—in spoken drama, there is ample debate on the merits of such approaches in stagings of Shakespeare), it has been argued that there is a special urgency in the case of Handel. Dean, among the most prominent opponents of "concept" stagings, maintains that Handel's operas are still too little known to withstand such interpretations without "becoming" the modern version in the minds of operagoers. "If a director were to set Falstaff in a shipyard or Fidelio in a brothel," he writes, "no lasting damage would be done, except perhaps to the director's reputation, and they would soon bounce back. That is not yet the case with Handel's operas."² Concurring with Dean, and noting the ubiquity of the modern approach, Andrew Jones laments, "Opera-goers are now so used to cheap jokes and ludicrous gimmicks in productions of Handel's operas in the major international opera houses that they have probably come to expect them—and critics do little to enlighten them."³

McVicar's 2005 Glyndebourne production of Giulio Cesare has taken center stage in the debate. The sheer number of reviews in newspapers and opera magazines on both sides of the Atlantic...